I am trying to improve the Romanian artist pages by adding tags and links to Discogs, Wikipedia/WikiData, Lyrics.wikia.com etc.
It would be very useful to have a script or tool - on the artist pages - that can simply check and then suggest links to other sites, so the user can check if those links are indeed about the same artist and if so, then quickly add them to the artist page.
When trying to improve hundreds of artist pages, it simply consumes way too much time to check manually for each artist, if there is a page on Discogs, RateYourMusic, Lyrics.wikia, itunes, spotify etc.
Not exactly what you are looking for but this script takes data from Wikidata and fills it out. If links to Discogs, lyrics pages, allmusic, etc are added to Wikidata - which they often are - then this script will fill them out automatically.
Also:
Please only add Wikidata links. Wikipedia links should only be added if Wikidata links donāt exist yet or by users who donāt know how to add Wikidata links. If youāre adding Wikidata anyway, then Wikipedia is superfluous.
You should be very careful if you are going through hundreds of artists, because some of them might be āhijackedā. Hijacked artist means that the entity was originally added as a different entity as it is now, which usually happens when artists share the same name. So for example editor 1 added the entry and added a release for the artist. Then editors 2, 3 and 4 added different releases, but all 3 of those were supposed to be credited to different artist. More editors then add more releases and on top of that someone adds an external link for the āincorrectā artist.
An example of hijacked artist: Rogue (UK EDM Producer). This was originally some UK pop group called āRougeā (first 2 edits), then someone added a release which belongs to Rouge (performance name for Tony Rapacioli), then someone added another release which belongs to Rouge (South-Asian trio) and then someone added a release which belongs to the UK EDM producer āRogueā which is the current artist and was changed in https://musicbrainz.org/edit/20117655 (this is the edit that hijacked the artist for good). Since then the artist has over 20 releases so in this case itās not worth to revert it to the original artist but I cleaned up the 2 releases that donāt belong to him, which were the first 2 releases that were added.
Most of the time itās not worth to revert the artist to the original entity because it only has 1-3 releases that belong to the original artist compared to the āhijackedā one that has way more releases/recordings and usually even some external links so it would take way longer. I donāt know if there is any official policy on this, whether to revert the artist to the original entry or just accept the fact that it is now the new artist and clean it up accordingly, guess itās just a judgement call of which approach takes less time that should be used.
Basically what Iām saying is that if you are going through tons of artists you should check their current state (releases, recordings, relationships, external links) and compare it with the first entry in edit history and if thereās any contradicting stuff you should proceed with caution when adding Discogs links.
That sounds like the artist has to be split, I think Iāve even seen somewhere a āsplitā option, but now I canāt remember where. In any case, it can be done manually
I already cleaned up the artist with my latest 4 edits to the artist entry (they are still pending, will be accepted in 2-3 days). The rest of the stuff that remains belongs to the UK EDM Producer.
Now this is completely new and very interesting for me!
I could never imagine that WikiData can contain links to all kind of websites like these
And then, is there any script to do the opposite - so I can harvest the MusicBrainz links to add them on WikiData database? I checked the U2 WikiData page and, at the āAllMusic artist IDā, it says āstated in: MusicBrainzā and āretrieved: 25 July 2015ā. The āretrievedā part sounds very interesting, it looks like there is a harvesting script somewhere there.
And how about āhijackingā the WikiData database in order to add such information about artists that have no articles on Wikipedia (yet)? Did anyone think about that?
I think itās always better to keep the original intent of entity creation but if itās too difficult and tedious, doing like you explain, with the less edit amount, is of course OK.
The Split into separate artists option that you can find in the rightāhand sidebar is when you want to change some collaboration artist like Ā« SIMON and GARFUNKEL Ā» into an artist creditā¢ (AC) instead like: Ā« SIMON and GARFUNKEL. Ā»
For cleaning up a big merge of homonym artists, we also usually say a split, but itās the manual task that @culinko explained, not that Split into separate artists button, that would be of no help in these cases.